Yet she sounds surprised - and dismayed - at the attacks on the bipartisan board she led until her term expired Aug. 27th, and the diminished clout of the national labor movement in general.

Story Continued Below

“It’s indisputable that labor is weakened. It’s been diminished from what it once was,” Liebman told POLITICO as she took a break from packing up her Washington office. “It’s dangerous to think of a democratic society that doesn’t have a strong independent labor movement. It’s important to a vital democracy.”

Labor’s decline has been a long steady one, but as a Democrat appointed NLRB chairman by President Barack Obama, Liebman observed first-hand both the powerful optimism felt by a union movement energized by his election as well as the struggles it has endured since then.

Two and a half years into the Obama presidency, labor’s high hopes have been smashed by a perfect storm of economics and politics: the worst recession in decades coupled with a faltering recovery, an aggressive assault by Republicans and big business and an inconsistent, conflicted White House.

That’s in addition to some familiar structural issues, including decades of declining membership — barely one in 10 private-sector employees belong to unions, compared with just over 20 percent in 1983 - and tough questions of whether organizations conceived in the Industrial Age are still relevant in the digital era, especially when many workers are grateful to have jobs at all.

“We’ve reached the point of diminishing returns in terms of the labor movement in this country,” said Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union, one of the country’s largest and most powerful unions. “We are under attack.”

In 2008, Stern’s SEIU, along with AFSCME and the AFL-CIO, played a critical role in returning a Democrat to the White House after eight years of Republican rule. And Obama, who famously pledged during the 2008 campaign to put on “comfortable shoes” and walk a picket line if necessary, has largely returned the favor with union-friendly appointments in his cabinet and administration – including installing Liebman, a former union lawyer, as chair of the NLRB, and making Craig Becker, a former lawyer for the SEIU and AFL-CIO, a recess appointment to the board. Stern and the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka, along with other labor leaders, are familiar faces in the White House.

Page:

CORRECTION: Corrected by: David Cohen @ 09/05/2011 09:36 PM
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated that Boeing had transferred a production line from Washington state to South Carolina. Boeing added a production line in South Carolina.